WOODY ALLEN AND BOB DYLAN ARTISTS

jean arp

Today's movie was Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, one I've seen five times as of today. This is over several years. It's almost thirty years old. I like to see it from time to time for a refresher to enjoy the thousands of details forgotten as it recedes into my past. This film was made in Allen's time of making his finest films. Mia Farrow was Allen's wife in that time and she played in several of his films. I never gave her much thought until she appeared in his films and I saw what a great actress she is. I chose the word great because good does not qualify with her. Other people in the movie were good actresses and actors, but Mia Farrow was great, is always great. I didn't realize how important she was to Allen until their divorce. Without her, his films have lost a major ingredient that I have to associate with her. I've not seen anything by Allen in his post-Mia era I'd want to see a second time, or even the first time. For one thing, he's been filming in London and Paris. He does not know those cultures well enough to weave his story in and out of the culture his characters are products of, and live in the way he does in New York. New York is the other subject in his New York films. He brought an architect into Hannah and Her Sisters for the chance to give us a tour of the city's varied architecture. I think New York City is the love of Woody Allen's life. He loves New York like I love the Blue Ridge. His films in his time with Mia Farrow were loaded with introspection, clever insights into American culture, New York culture, the people of New York. American culture is one of Allen's themes. His New York stories are even comments on American culture. Outside New York his characters do not flow with the culture they live in like they do in New York. New York is one of the characters in Allen's stories. I've largely given up looking for a post-Mia film by Allen that satisfies in myself the fullness he taught me to appreciate in his art form. I've decided to review his films I love instead of seeing more of the new ones that consistently disappoint. Match Point was a weak rewriting and redirecting of Crimes and Misdemeanors, one of his very finest, perhaps my favorite.

 

jean arp

 

I don't like to cast judgment on an artists work, especially an artist such as Woody Allen. It seems like writers and artists of other forms have a period when they were doing their best work. I don't expect an artist to give an even performance. Harold Pinter comes to mind as the exception to that rule of thumb. Pinter's plays were rungs on a ladder in that they were better and better, one play to the next, all the way along his career as a London playwright. Shakespeare's progression was to the better with each play unto King Lear and The Tempest. It was looking like Woody Allen was in that same line of progression. He started making movies about young people he did not understand in a city he did not understand, anyway not like he understood New York. Too many generation gaps separate him from the young of today. I think of a college professor friend who found after so many generation gaps he lost his feeling that he could relate with his students. He stayed with them for quite awhile and they gradually slipped away from him, year by year. I don't get the sense from Woody Allen's recent films that he can relate with the young anymore either. I don't mean to advise him on his life as writer, actor and director of his films. I don't mean to criticize. I don't like to speculate on that which can never be known, but it seems like Mia was a muse for him. I don't dare attempt to find out why. This man has an appointment with a psychiatrist every day. One would think it would make him either super rational or super nutty. It's made him neither. He is a writer, an actor, comedian, musician, director, making production, a successful New York artist. He's also a husband, a father, his society New York's wealthiest. I'm thinking he might be a workaholic motivated by wanting to have little time for the social part of that society or any other. He's like a Bob Dylan of film. Dylan is a songwriter, singer, musician, bandleader, director of a traveling show requiring a multitude of electricians, trucks, workers and musicians. He has a radio show on a satellite radio channel. These are two of many artists in my generation whose art success has made them into businessmen with an extensive staff.  

 

jean arp

 

These are two busy men, both of them artists whose art forms start with writing. Allen writes a screenplay, Dylan writes a collection of songs. Allen puts the script into production through his own staff as director. Dylan gathers a band to learn the songs, practice and record the songs. Next, the tour, interviews, photographers, lawyers, fans. Driven workaholics. The kind of people who would have immense success at whatever they chose to do. They are artists who did not listen to the people around them saying you can't make any money doing art. Allen and Dylan were both so hyper talented in their early years, it seemed like the talent was so big it drove them. The talent itself  made workaholics of them to keep up. I've heard that when Woody Allen made the film of his Tuesday night clarinet band playing in Europe, he lodged himself separately from the band and didn't spend much time with them. Dylan, I've heard, stays to himself on tour, doesn't party or sit around and shoot the shit. Looks to me like they're both so busy they don't have the time or the inclination to drink too much and listen to other people complain. They're both writing while they're making production. I'm guessing what they like about their privilege of fame and money is it affords them the luxury to do nothing but work on their art making. Both Dylan and Allen need genius minds to multi-task on such a scale as they do. I've never heard or read anything about either one of them being charming socially. Quite the opposite. In the video of Obama hanging a medal around Dylan's neck, it showed Obama was impressed that this was Bob Dylan, while Dylan found it another occasion to say harrumph. I too often forget that the people like them who are rich and famous were once young artists in their beginnings and nobody ever heard of them while they were looking for the "break" that would take them where they are today.

jean arp

 

ROB COPELAND FACEBOOK FRIEND

new facebook face

 

Facebook has become a part of my life, and it has become a part of the lives of several people I know and people I don't know. I even have facebook friends I don't know. Not many. I'm not one to collect facebook friends like autographs in the high school annual. I prefer just people I know. An awful lot of my facebook friends are people I call friends out in pre-cyber world. I don't have the greatest, longest list of friends there is, but when I look at the list with pictures of my facebook friends, I think they are really neat people individually. I feel rich in the people I know. Again, not numbers, but fullness of caring. It's taken a long time for me to fall into the flow of writing comments that are more than a few words. Sometimes I'll write a paragraph in the comment box. I like about facebook too, that I have become acquainted with some folks I think are cool people, people who think about things, who see fresh perspectives, both visually and conceptually. I've recently become friends with a guy in NYC from Chester, Virginia, outside Richmond, who has been taking b&w photographs of New York with his cell phone. They are gorgeous photographs. Color pictures too. He gets the curved reflection on a bus windshield of buildings across the street, and through the reflection can be seen the driver's open side window framing a section of the same building  without distortion, inside the windshield reflection. I like that he leaves somewhere a clue to help you see that the image is the back window of a car, or the roof of a car, the hood.

rob copeland

 

To go straight to the point and not beat around the metaphorical bush, I love everything about Rob's photographs. Every detail. The compositions I see first. Then, looking at the composition, the details take over and pull the eye deeper into the picture. For my eye, this picture above of a Manhattan street satisfies my eye all the way in the distance to the last trace of the buildings. It's perspective he plays with in a lighthearted surrealist way. Surrealism was originally lighthearted. Rob's images have a lightness that makes them float in place. I'm not trying to sound fancy. It's the best I can put into a few words what I feel visually in his photographs. Each one exists on its own. It's like it has its own existence. This is the quality I call art. I've seen so many by now that when I see a movie filmed in contemporary New York, it becomes a story Rob's photographs illustrate. His visual appreciation of Manhattan is there with Woody Allen's. Rob's photographs catch a glimpse of personality in the city. In my own experience, I sometimes like to make close up photos of donkey faces, looking for a portrait that gives a sense of the donkey's personality, same as I do getting a portrait of a person I know. In a lot of the donkey pictures, the eyes somehow express the personality. Jenny's eyes are so alive in photographs I tend to speak to her like her consciousness is there. This is what I mean about Rob's photos glimpsing the personality of New York City, day and night, cars, people, architecture, compositions found in pavement, stairways, subways. His pictures somehow depict a living presence I find unusual. He is making quite a catalogue of strikingly beautiful images of the city, new ones every day, contemporary as it gets.

ai wei wei

 Rob posts the day's new pictures on facebook every day. I love to go through them, image to image, the day's catch. He plays with the art of the reflection, the art of the shadow, the art of the blur. Other photographers, of my limited experience, sometimes will use a reflection in a larger image, but I've never seen anybody make an art form of reflections that makes me "reflect" -- why did it take so long in the evolution of photography as an art form for the obvious to be noticed? These reflections have been there all along, varieties of them, everywhere, and we tend to look through them. When I go to the Mexican restaurant in Sparta, it has glass all across the front, curtained on the inside, I tend to look through the reflection at the decorations they have in the window and notices in Spanish. I miss the panorama reflected image of the parking lot behind me, the houses in the distance and the sky, selfie in landscape. It's there in front of my face like standing in front of a movie screen, and I look through it. I've become aware of reflections since knowing Rob's photographs. In store windows, I see what is inside and the reflection on the glass of the cars going by and stores across the street. Instead of wishing for a way not to see the reflection, now I welcome the reflection equal the display in the window. When I see the reflection too, it makes a kind of Rauschenberg silkscreen of one image over another. I started noticing the reflections I had been seeing through and it was almost like a new dimension, new awareness, seeing the first time what has always been there. It's a Duh moment. The kind where you slap the palm of your hand to your forehead and say, Where have you been all your life?

rob copeland

Rob and I have never met and may never. We've become friends by way of the comment boxes on facebook. Writing back and forth  we're acquainted such that we could have extended conversation were we to meet. As it is, we have extended conversation by way of facebook over time instead of compacted. I believe we know each other well enough now to speak freely over the phone like with someone we've known for years. I started seeing Rob's posts when I friended a friend of his, also Rob, and Rob Copeland's photographs began to appear daily. My thought was that this is somebody in New York like Robert Frank, Gordon Parks, Gary Winogrand, and probably has a book of photographs in print. I went to amazon.com to see if he had any books. Not there. I took it for granted he had been at New York photography several years, was well known and respected in NY photography world, someone whose vision of the city is particularly his own and at the same time obvious. Until you see it, it's not there, and it was there all along. His photographs have different dimensions about them. He's not satisfied with only one dimension in his images. It turns out Rob Copeland is a guy in NY who has taken photographs for years and years, a lot of really good ones, but few that touched art. Then he bought his cell phone and started taking pictures with it, discovered reflections a little at a time until one day he saw them everywhere. He asked facebook friends to vote on possible names to call his pictures for the blogsite. Much interest in the word reflections. My anti-poetic suggestion was the word reflections is way overused unto meaningless. It was just a vote, no intent to persuade. He chose UPON REFLECTION: A UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE OF NEW YORK CITY. When I saw it I lit up with joy. Just right. The word needed to be there, and he took the Vaseline lens poetic out of it like somebody who has written a good bit of advertising copy. It's clean and straight ahead. It's a headline that tells you in a few words what his pictures are doing. Rob, that was truly a poetically inspired moment, upon reflection. It's beautiful.

 

rob Copeland

 

I don't mean to be an ongoing commercial for Rob's art, but can't help it. I feel awe when I look at Rob's photographs, the same kind of awe when I see images by Joel Meyerowitz. I've said that before and mean it so much I'll probably say it again. Rob's photographs  have a stillness about them, a window onto metropolis in high-speed motion silent as a still life. I like knowing Rob through his art form, his new found art form in a time in his life when he felt like he needed something to connect for him. I don't want to make any wishes for Rob and his art that he would not want to make himself. And I don't know what they would be. I don't wish anything for him. I feel like Rob is in his flow and doesn't need the static of other people's wishes and ideas about what he oughta, except for when he puts out an appeal to his facebook friends to give him some feedback and ideas on a given decision. The best I can do for him is encourage. Feedback is important to artists of all varieties. Feedback does not mean advising, but giving honest thoughts on the matter. Not criticizing, but addressing, talking about. 

http://robcopelandphotography.blogspot.com  This link will take you to Rob's photographic blog quick as thought itself. It's just a click away.

 

rob Copeland

 

 

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PHOTOGRAPHS OF ROB COPELAND

 

rob copeland

 

 

 

rob copeland

 

Above are some of the first pictures I saw of Rob Copeland's on facebook. He was a friend of someone I'd recently facebook friended. He sent some b&w photos to friend that appeared on my facebook page. Next day others. Next day others. As I'm seeing these pictures, I'm seeing somebody with a Gary Winogrand kind of eye, but his own with no references to Winogrand. Very different minds, but an eye that appreciates detail in the New York cityscape. I even see some of Woody Allen's love for visual detail in NYC. Copeland's reflection pictures work with my eye on two dimensions at once, 2-D and 3-D. They have the flatness of a 2-D photograph like the one of the car glass reflecting rows of windows on a flat plane. The car glass in the foreground looks at the same time like it is on the same plane as the building behind it. These images throw my eye back and forth between the two dimensions. That's what I love so much about them along with his eye for b&w. I don't know if he's a noted NY art photographer or not. I'd prefer not for the freshness in the images. And I'd automatically think that I am not the first to notice somebody in NY making stunning New York pictures that to this hillbilly's eye are stunningly new. No matter how little experience I have in viewing contemporary New York photographers, when an image jumps in my face and says SEE ME by its presence that is also not flash, by the power of its presence, I call it art. His images have visual power for me. I feel them.

 

rob Copeland

The one with the vertical white light is reflection on right of image on left. It's like what is the background beyond the white picket fence is the flat, 2-D photograph, and on the right these dots come out of the picture toward the viewer, making it 3-D. I may be way off, but this is what I see. And I don't think I'm exaggerating, because this is the first time I have at least noticed photographs that carry the illusion no matter how many times I look at it. It might be something a thousand photographers in NY are doing and I don't know it, but I've never seen any photographer with this kind of eye. All his pictures don't do that, of course, but enough do that I see it is something he has discovered, evidently recently. He even finds images that are not reflections that suggest reflections. I've looked at his collection of photographs on facebook and saw in the past the occasional reflection, then more and more, and recently just about everything is reflections. I'm thinking he's getting his mind blown by this new discovery. I've seen a lot of pictures of reflections, but Copeland's are the first in my experience, which is limited, that play with dimensions at the same time. Whatever the case where NY photographers is concerned, I don't know. What I know is Copeland's pictures knock my sox off. I also know I'm not the only one to see the art in what he is doing.

rob Copeland

 

 

His photographs bring to mind a couple of films I've seen with dim to vague to vanishing recollection of what they were. I'm not even sure they were the ones. One is Kieslowski's BLIND CHANCE, a film so fine I want to see it again, and Takashi Miike's GRAVEYARD OF HONOR, another I want to see again. Just now ran them to the top of the netflix Q, both will be here Wednesday. It will be a film festival at my house that night, double feature of some of my favorite films. The Miike film is severely violent, but I appreciate it despite that, including that, beyond that. Overkill turns into comedy before long. Somebody blows away a room full of people, no big thang, just like evening news. Whether or not Graveyard of Honor is the one I was remembering with faulty memory doesn't matter. I do remember that when it was over I made a mental note to remember the title, because I wanted to see it again after a lapse of time, not right away. Ready to see it again. I'm excited already about Wednesday. Another of Miike's magnificent kill fests is 13 ASSASSINS. It's kind of on the order of 7 SAMURAI, but it's 13. Beautiful film. Beautifully made in every way a film can be beautiful. But, if you're into chick flicks, do not go there. And there is a Chinese film I'm recalling made I think in Taiwan. I'll go searching and see if it can be found. Soon. 

 

 

rob copeland

 

 

This is one of his pictures I picked up from his facebook collection from the past that I see the same eye that made the reflection pictures. This is a common NYC scene, the kind that wherever you walk, you'll pass a work zone of color compositions. Here, we're seeing the orange rectangles and lines horizontal and vertical, a rectangular patch of green, seen through a grid of vertical and horizontal lines, squares, a fence. My mind knows the grid of squares is the foreground and everything else is the background, while my eye sees the grid on the same plane as the background, like the picture was printed on paper that already had the lines on it. This is what I love about Copeland's pictures, the juxtaposition of the two dimensions. The perceived real and the perceived illusion together, side by side as one image. If I'd found the above scene with a camera I'd have wet my pants on the spot. Feeling my own excitement in his images gives an idea of what he's feeling framing the shots. Going by his notations in facebook with the pictures he posts almost daily, he is rigorous about his pictures. Goes out early in the morning walking with camera, searching for magic moments in reflections.

 

 

rob copeland

 

 



I don't know Copeland except suddenly in these amazing photographs that bring to mind some of the photographers I've enjoyed over the years like Joel Meyerowitz, esp the pictures in his book Cape Light. Gary Winogrand I see, though only in the cityscape and the way of using b&w with high contrast. I get the impression Copeland has not made a book of photographs. I can't find anything at amazon. A lot of his images have the quality of art about them that holds my gaze the thousandth time I see one. I can see a show in a NY gallery of his reflection images. It would be a beautiful exhibit. Extraordinarily beautiful. His images excite me because I know they're everywhere. He has opened a new dimension to my awareness. Walking through parking lots I look at clouds and signs on windshields, hoods, trunklids, chrome. In shop windows I look at the reflection first. My sort of logo picture for this blog is a reflection image. The difference between his and mine is that he is focusing on reflections, where mine was a found reflection, noticed because it jumped in my face with lights all around it that said SEE ME, FEEL ME. Now I'm seeing reflections everywhere when I'm in town. Out here in the mountain is clouds and trees in the glass of the car. Thank you, Rob Copeland, for opening up a whole new world for appreciation in everyday life. I don't have art museums to go to around here, so I look for art where I can find it. I see Rob Copeland keeps his eye alert for found art in his world as urban as my world is rural. I don't know how to tell you to find more unless you can look him up on facebook. I doubt he'd mind you asking to view his photographs.  

 

 

rob Copeland

 

rob Copeland

 

 

rob Copeland

 

 

 

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rob Copeland

 

 

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HENRY GELDZAHLER AND POP ART

roy lichtenstein

Today's video was a fairly collage-like documentary of art and artists in NY. 1950-1970. I liked about the film that it caught the spirit of the time and place, post-WW2 New York, the abstract expressionist period, emphasis in the film on the flow into Pop then minimalism unto conceptualism, the last years of the Modern period that began with Impressionism. The film looked at the art of this period through the point of view of Henry Geldzahler, a museum curator who involved himself in the art of the time visiting new artists, getting to know them, finding out what they were doing, discovering a new spirit among younger artists in the time Abstract Expressionism was finally being recognized as valid art, then the oncoming of Pop that Geldzahler recognized as the next new thing. I remember his name from the art press of the time, books on Pop I read to find out about the new are that had the abstract expressionist painters calling it propaganda and anything else they could think of. Abstraction was soft-edged and Pop was hard-edged, a major difference in the time, a difference the abstractionists pointed to as invalid in painting.

Pop was possibly the first art period of the Modern era that caught the public eye. There were long lines of people waiting to get into a show of the new Pop artists. I went to New York in the time and saw a huge show of Pop with hundreds of people milling about, talking about particular sculptures and paintings with an excited awe. I felt it too. It was fun. It was nutty. It was off the wall. A show of Abstract Expressionists was serious. It was an intellectual art form. It embraced existentialism. It was pure art, expression as it happened. Pop popped the bubble of intellectual art that you had to read Nietzsche to really get it, Unamuno too. The spirit of pop broke the line between high art and low art. Pop made high art by incorporating low art, like rock n roll in the way it incorporates other musics. Anything that gets close to it, rock incorporates. Pop was open to finding art everywhere you look, like the grocery store, the beach, the sidewalk, store fronts, graffiti, beer cans. Geldzahler created exhibitions, bought for museums, connected artists with collectors and created his own collection.

Henry Geldzahler's name was as well known in that time as one of the artists. He was most widely known as somebody who appreciated Andy Warhol's work when few got it. Geldzahler created the Modern collection in the Metropolitan. The day I went to the Met, I was awed by what I saw when I stepped into the space.

I have to stop. The blogger site has an interface that seldom works. Tonight it is not working AGAIN.

DEATH AND KARMA

        willem dekooning, pirate, 1981

Had a call this morning from my friend Judy who lives near Atlanta. She's back from a few days in NY seeing her sister. She went to Museum of Modern Art and saw the present show of deKoonings. She said he painted like a master in all the styles he painted through his lifetime. I would love it. MoMA is a reason almost good enough to live in New York. I don't think I was ever aggressive enough to live in New York and didn't want to become New York aggressive. I'd need a lot of money to live there. I'd want to be going to some sort of concert or art show every evening. There is so much that is wonderful in New York. The only problem, as I can see it, is it costs a fortune to live there. I'm too sensitive to other people's psychic energy to live in a honeycomb with people in every cell. It seems creepy to me. Times I've been in the city, I'd look at apartment buildings with all the windows; people above, below, to the sides, out the windows. It seems unnatural to me to live where just about the only part of the natural world is people. Above, you have clouds. I need the world of tree frogs, flying and chirping birds, trees, bugs too.

I like it that hunters hunt all around where I live. It's a good place to stay indoors during hunting season. This hunter and that hunter might be good and never take chances. Not all of them are like that. Some hear something and take what they call a "sound shot." It only takes one. It was somewhere between 10 and 20 years ago, a news story from down in the flat part of North Carolina. Father and son hunting. Good hunters. Dad takes a sound shot. Finds his son with a hole in the head, blows his own head off. Happy Thanksgiving mama. Stories like this happen every year in every county up and down the mountains from Maine to Alabama. I like living in a place where people hunt, because that's where the wild things are. When my dad was visiting here many years ago, he stepped out of the car, looked around and said, "This is where I need to live," so he could hunt all the time. I thought: that's the reason the mountain called me to it and not you.

My first month in the mountains, associated with the farm, some rangers from forestry came to tell us about something to do with Christmas trees. They were talking with Ted Stern and I was tagging along behind. I was the one they were to give the information too, but he was the important one. I heard one of the rangers telling him about what the Bible says, that the Lord gave man dominion over all the animals. He took it to mean the right to kill them. My jaw dropped. I took dominion for the responsibility to take care of. Dictionary says dominion is supreme authority. That still doesn't say the right to kill. Say I'm the admiral of an aircraft carrier with dominion over the entire crew. Does that mean right to kill? I don't think so. But that is a puny way of looking at it. Killing is the major factor in life on earth. Everything that eats has to eat something that's alive, and it sometimes needs killing first. Sometimes, like grass, it is killed as it's eaten. I suppose what makes killing something reprehensible among humans is killing without intent to eat. Like killing all the buffalo and leaving them to rot was not responsible dominion. The Plains Indians were in awe of what manner of man could do such as that. It wasn't believable, but there it was.

Like the ranger was talking about hunting deer to eat, God and dominion, it makes more sense to me now, many years later, after I've come to see that death is nothing in God's eye. Intent to end somebody else's life for revenge or rage or money or whatever, is an egoic act all the way. When it's egoic like that, then it's an issue. When a man has to eat, he brings home a deer, cuts it up, puts the parts in the freezer and his woman feeds the family with it through the year. I have a hard time with shooting crows for target practice. Every hunting season thins our crow population considerably. But, as long as I'm not the one doing it, it's not an issue for me. The crows are advanced to their next lifetime. I don't know what kind of karmic debt would go with killing crows, incredibly intelligent birds that live in families, for target practice. It doesn't compute for me, but killing is a rush for a lot of people, an ego rush. Crows will stay out of your garden if you throw them the daily garbage. The garbage will go a whole lot further making friends with the crow family that shares your territory than it will in a plastic bag in a landfill. 

I don't know about anything having to do with death, what's on the other side, anything. Only that when it happens, like Lou Reed said, "it's the final thing to do." More Lou Reed: "Why don't you take your old lady by the feet and drag out in the darkened street and by morning she'll be just another hit and run." One of his many New York stories. It's like his heart is with the down and out people, and for all the comfortable people he seethes with contempt. His album called New York is one of my favorites.  I've been a Lou Reed and Velvet Underground fan for a very long time. The songs are portraits of New York street people. They bring to my mind the American poet Edgar Lee Masters, who also wrote portraits of people. In the New York street scene, death is common; OD, murder, suicide, every kind of way. In the country a rabbit runs under your tire, a deer jumps out in front of you, a dog runs under the wheel, so many unavoidable moments of killing without intent. I say a prayer for their souls and write it off to the modern world. I don't like it, but got used to it. 

I don't know if I'll ever understand the subtle world of intent. Some time in the 1980s I was called to jury duty on a local murder. It came down to we had to decide whether it was intent or accident. She swore it was an accident. The sheriff swore it was intent. The jury decided it was accident. When I handled the shotgun passed around the jury, I realized everything she said was true. The stock was made so when the thumb pushed the lever to open the shotgun, it automatically moved the forefinger to touch the trigger, which in this case was a hair trigger. She said she pushed the lever to open it and it went off. Sure enough. When I saw she was telling the truth, I saw how much the sheriff was making the story what he wanted it to be, and was not being the least bit objective about it, wasn't from the start. He wanted her put away. It was going around the county among the men that it won't be safe for a man to take a shower. After the trial, a man said that to me, and I asked him if he had reason to worry. It was a hot trial. I saw with my own eyes the sheriff lie to the prosecutor. She was drilling somebody on the witness stand, turned to the sheriff and with a look asked if he'd done what was said he did and he shook his head no. I was glad to see the defendant go free. I heard later the judge agreed with the jury's decision. That was good to hear.

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